


;;-->> revival

by Black



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games), Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Genre: Blood, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Metafiction, from the bombing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-26 03:35:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19759771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Black/pseuds/Black
Summary: This is the reality - sometimes there is no satisfaction to an ending.





	;;-->> revival

**Author's Note:**

> i went back to an older writing style of mine that feels so much better. 
> 
> a little more of a personal piece, if it isn't obvious. 
> 
> how do _you_ contend with regret?

Ivan wakes up. 

There’s ash drifting down. There’s blood on his hoodie. It’s soaking through. There is no poetic way to say that he’s dying, he’s sure of it. There’s also no easier way to say that he expected death to be harder. 

He’s not sure where he is and he doesn’t want to know. Those flowery words don’t come. It’s just ash. Against his cheeks. Clinging to the tears. There’s no doubt that he’s crying, he’s sure of it. That’s not blood. That’s not oil. That’s not - whatever. 

Is _this_ what dying people think of? 

Dipping below the veil of consciousness and bobbing back up. Ivan doesn’t think anyone is coming. What was the point of waking? There is regret in these bones, there is regret in the crisscrossed fabric of his stitched up hoodie. All yellow and red. and grey. 

This piece is about regret and the paths we take to get there - these words are bloodied and personal. The obsessive racing of a dead man’s thoughts and the mangled hand clutching over his heart. 

Why has it been left here?

Ivan closes his eyes, knowing that he’ll swell up and over the surface again. He hopes this time that someone comes for him. He hopes that he’ll be able to right his wrongs. To feel them is to live - but today he is numbed. 

He doesn’t understand it right now, the wounds are still too raw and too new. They haven’t crusted over yet, they haven’t become sugary sweet. He only knows the burning, sobbing feeling of having trusted someone that he shouldn’t have. 

The damage has been done. Fate has been sealed.   
There is no changing the past. 

Ivan dips back into poetics and into the smoke and ash, feeling it ache in his lungs as he wheezes out under closed eyes. The concrete is prickling and warm, fluid against his back as he falls back into the alley of limbo and swims sleepily by street lights and stop signs. 

All thoughts are simple here - primal and flowering moon-white.   
Reaching.

Ivan knows the taste of betrayal and he is angry.   
Ivan knows the taste of confusion and he is hurt. 

Ivan knows how it feels to be abandoned

and yet now he also knows how it feels to enact the word itself. 

He’s left drifting in a world so unfamiliarly familiar to him. 

Unruly and uninhibited in his refusal to admit that in all his wild abandon, he needs to grit his teeth and just apologize. And no Ivan, not only in words. Not only words as he 

wakes up, eyes spinning and crackling to life to see Vaclav’s terrified face. Oh. He hates that. There’s no poetic way to say that he’s betrayed someone’s trust. Worse yet, someone that loves him still - so syrupy and bitter how love sticks to ribs and trembling lips and the color red. 

It’s always looked so lovely on Koller. 

Glancing down at his blood-soaked hoodie crumpled near the bottom of the infamous chair, Ivan wants to comment that yellow is more his style. He feels it inappropriate though. 

“Where did you go?” 

Vaclav shakes his tired shoulder just a little with the question - his fingers trembling. For all the years that Ivan has known him, he’s learned that anger is the only thing to move Vaclav so physically. Or was it fear? 

Or are the two the same? 

“Not sure,” Ivan’s throat is concrete - solid in both feeling and nature. How does he describe the watery galaxy that had consumed another him in another time? How does he explain that he knows this because he is poetics and 

paradoxes? 

Omnipresent and ghastly, his eyes ache and he wants to close them. Vaclav asks him not to. 

The TV chatters softly nearby with news of the bombing. The death toll. The unidentified man that had planted the bombs - the lack of body. 

“Did you…”

Vaclav already knows the answer - Don’t you think Ivan?

“Yes,” he manages - and that’s all. The stars are calling to him again. He isn’t dying this time - well, not physically. Instead of disgust, Vaclav pulls up his rolling chair and sits down simply to hold his hand. Squeeze his palms. The pressure plates.

He feels the bitterness of regret and betrayal. He does not yet understand the joy of being able to feel such things - the journey of becoming better. He just knows that he has made a mistake and should not be alive. 

What he does know is that sorry does not begin to cover the choices he has made. 

So he squeezes around those gentle, hurt fingers. He feels them trembling. He feels them creep, he feels them still at his wrist. Then back down to his palm. Their fingers crisscross together. 

Sometimes words cannot repair the damage done - sometimes it is the unspoken intimacy between two souls that can only be apologetic. To feel is to be joyous and today he is not numbed; though everything is too loud to be happy. 

Despite Koller’s pleading, he holds his breath again. 

Ivan stares into stars and their smiling faces. He struggles to think of a sentence to properly describe the incident, feeling helpless as he floats down. down. 

passing sharks and sorrow, their gnashing teeth curled into tiger’s grins as they drift. 

Ivan wakes up and the time is 12:34.   
Are you haunted?  
Have you ghosts? 

For a split second between minutes changing, he feels the pang of other lives still drowning. His hand slides forward and he finds skin. Something shifts in front of him and there’s the scent of sandalwood and oil and he knows this is Adam Jensen. 

Everything floods him and it moves him with wild abandon; oh! there’s that word again. 

Regret pours out of his eyes - that’s a terribly poetic way of trying to say that he’s crying once more. That he’s laying against something both chilled and warmed and sobbing into something that loves him. 

It’s 12:37 and a lifetime has passed.   
The loss is substantial. 

There are arms around him. The glint of gold from the moon moves him - such a handsome color on such a gentle man. Carved from marble and the concrete of war, Adam Jensen doesn’t say a word as his fingers play up and down the divots of Ivan’s naked spine. 

There’s skin here. 

There’s warmth here. 

He thinks he doesn’t want to leave this place but his regret has not yet cycled through - there is still a heaviness that he cannot place. 12:39 and he’s closing his eyes and himself up again. The lapping of limbo ripples over his augs and floods the seams. the cracks. the careless holes that he’s left to remind himself of his time spent with manipulation. 

That’s why he and Adam get along so well you know. 

Despite their savior’s claims, their sacrifices were not warranted in the end. A loss of control, a rush of trust with drawing out plans and signing documents. Standing up to this savior left one a little more broken than before, standing up to the other left one broken and blown apart. 

Falling into the sheets, Ivan claws at the surface and finds no purchase. 

The fluid slides thick through his fingers, easing his descent as he breathes in and allows the chill to enter his lungs. 

Who have you hurt? 

Mothers and fathers  
and kids  
My friends, my wife   
_My -_

_self_ -reflection is important in fixing holes blown open with narcissistic and needy bombs - demanding hours of his manic time holed up in Golem. Dare he say his name? It drudges up such darkness that he doesn’t like to look at. The confrontation is painful - but he is the one who allows it that power. 

Viktor had charmed him - had promised him the power to move he and his wife into a safe place. 

And he wakes up into that fear. 

Fingers clutched at the table as he stares down at the scribbling that he’s done at the request of absolutely little to no sleep. You must help me Ivan, you must do these things for your family - the good of all augs, no? You are so important to this puzzle. You are my favorite piece. 

You are my favorite piece

of concrete to toss through windows and we’re getting poetic again. What I’m trying to say is that Viktor saw Ivan as only a means to an end and I wish I could end this piece here. I wish I could tell you that Ivan learns from the pounding on the dirty shipping crate turned house and notices the aggression behind each pointed knock. 

He does not. 

The door pops open and he ducks down with closed eyes and chews at his cheek, the stress beating black and blue against his straining heart. His head isn’t right. The meds are gone. 

And he’s sinking like a stone, eyes open as he stares at a new moon and a sparkling sky. He has yet to answer exactly what regret is - he has yet to find solidarity in any single thought. Everything mingles together and the great above shudders with the weight. 

Is it what he avoids? Is it what he faces?  
Is it the distress he’s come to know or 

when he wakes into the skin of Adam’s neck, back in their apartment and clinging to his shoulders with trembling hands. I know Ivan - that only happens when he’s afraid, when he’s seen his monsters and knows that tonight they’re lurking. 

They understand what regret tastes like -   
They understand how to kill it -

and everything tastes like ash. 

“Fuck,” he says, anchoring himself onto Adam so he doesn’t drift again. That’s all he says. There is no other dialogue to better describe the dizzying journey of trying to piece together coping mechanisms for revealing in mistakes you’ve made and cannot unmake. 

The bombs have already gone off.   
Viktor has already sweet-talked him.   
Melissa has already drifted away.   
Vaclav already has blood on his hands - such a lovely color. 

There’s no doubt that’s he’s crying now, Adam’s worried fingers sliding through his hair and ruffling away the stardust. What I’m trying to say is that despite the drifting, Ivan is no closer to figuring out how to contend with the choices he’s picked with such wild abandon. 

This is the reality - sometimes there is no satisfaction to an ending. It just is - something tied up messily in the bows of regret and the salt of the sea. Breaking against the pull of the moon, against the lone sea that swallowed both of them up and spit them both up as different men -

both just a little more broken than before.


End file.
